A sore sight for tired eyes

By Joerg Colberg
Aug 22, 2005

I have been asked lots of times, why I am not using images any longer. As visitors familiar with what this weblog looked like 2 years ago will remember there were sample images for most photographers. The way I did this was to what they call “hot-link” images, namely to use images on the photographers’ websites as the source. As a direct consequence, I didn’t have to host them. The problem with that is that this uses the photographers’ bandwidth. Did I have a problem with that? Yes and no. Yes, because it’s kind of unfair; no, because they get free advertizing with hundreds of people looking at their stuff. But I eventually figured that the hassle created by the occasional complaint about it wasn’t worth the trouble. On top of that, very often links disappear and don’t work any longer. While that’s just annoying for actual links, when you use photos you suddenly get little red crosses or whatever else your browser shows you. So there is a lot of extra maintenance work involved.

Of course, I could host the images on my own server, but then I’d have to ask the photographers for permission first (I don’t think other weblogs do that but I don’t think that’s fair), and I don’t have the time for that. Plus, I don’t have the bandwidth myself, and upgrading to new hosting would cost money, which I also don’t have.

Thus, as much as I enjoyed the original photo look, this issue still needs to be sorted out. On the plus side, as it is now the weblog loads very quickly. Always look at the bright side…